Johannesburg, 10 Feb 2020
As enterprises’ demands look set to continue maturing in 2020, they are better able to distinguish between cloud platforms and identify which ones work best for their applications.
“It’s no longer about moving to cloud, it’s about which cloud,” says Andrew Cruise, managing director at Routed, Africa’s only vendor-neutral cloud infrastructure provider.
“Now that market penetration of cloud, particularly internationally, has hit a critical mass, we see enterprises are much more confident about moving workloads than before, when it appeared they would be on the bleeding edge. While there are still some concerns around uptime, performance and security, these are largely being addressed without any need to reinvent the wheel,” he says.
Multicloud is already broadly being achieved through SaaS applications like Salesforce.com and Office365, through utilising an enterprise’s own on-premises infrastructure, and via several other cloud platforms.
“True multicloud, however, involves IaaS from multiple providers across native hyperscale IaaS (or PaaS) as well as private cloud, both hosted and on-premises,” says Cruise.
In order to successfully implement multicloud, Cruise notes that an enterprise would need to replace parts of its overall infrastructure estate, either by re-hosting workloads (lift and shift) into a hosted private cloud, or re-architecting applications in a cloud-native way to suit native hyperscale clouds. Secure connectivity, through VPN, SD-WAN or private circuit, is also a must.
He adds that the biggest benefit of multicloud is the way in which it lends itself to a best-of-breed approach. “Not one single cloud can ever be the silver bullet to solve all of an enterprise’s problems. Cloud only, hybrid cloud, or on-premises only solutions are already legacy and too restrictive. Utilising a hosted private cloud for traditional applications as an initial ‘lift and shift’ can make it easier to digitally transform by alleviating pressure on on-premises resources, and allow them time to properly re-architect suitable applications in the native hyperscale cloud.”
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